Mciy 25, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
27 
liberty produced in the Manchester School an individual- 
ism shockingly indifferent to the lives of the labourers. 
It is equally true that the Prussian disciplinarians have 
taken considerable care of the lives of labourers ; the care 
which nigger-drivers have almost invariably taken of 
niggers. When we say these things, it is not a denuncia- 
tion but a description. As the contrast appears in the 
English vices, so it appears in the Prussian virtues. Thus, 
that the Prussian kings worked hard for. Prussia is as 
rcrtain as that they worked hard against humanity. The 
fact that they saved money off their pleasures is as certain 
as that they always spent it on their power. The fact 
that they often kept the peace even under provocation is 
as certain as that they always broke the peace without 
provocation. 
Tradition of Freedom 
I have deliberately kept to a strict under-statement 
of patriotic claim ; for the real case for England is best 
seen when all possible deductions have been made. And 
when they are all made, I believe it is still true that the 
vague English tradition of freedom, with its excesses in 
aristocracy and amateurism, has been proved even in the 
])resent war to be more practical than the Prussian 
centraHsation and rigidity. No rational person will 
deny that we have suffered heavily from the muddles 
and scandals which come from being governed, as we are 
so largely governed, by a sort of social club. We have 
all the disadvantages that come from such a system ; 
the shifting of responsibility, the gossip, the network of 
nepotism. Certain newspapers fan a perpetual fury 
against ministerial mismanagement ; though I think that 
England has been in more peril from the organisation of 
the newspapers than from the disorganisation of the 
Government. It is always easy to show that any govern- 
ment is inefficient, this sort of government especially. 
But when they proceeded to prove that the Prussian type 
of government is efficient, they broke down. 
That Prussianised Germany is supremely efficient is 
indeed widely asserted and often taken for granted. 
When I remarked elsewhere on the spiritual insanity of 
modern Germany, a critic ruefully expressed the wish 
that the German rulers would bite some of our own. 
I am far from saying that the German rulers may not 
bite somebody ; one never can tell where true scientitic 
progress may lead. But I am prepared to maintain that 
in the plain test of positive battle, their biting has been 
much less effective than General Joffre's nibbling. And 
I do not think it will be denied that, touching " der Tag " 
and the British Navy, their bark has been much worse 
than their bite. 
Careful preparation, of course, there was. The German 
is prepared for everything except emergencies. It may 
even be said that he is always ready for anything, except 
the thing that happens. But the kind of readiness he 
had is much more conclusi\-e in showing him to be morally 
wrong than in showing him to be intellectually right. 
After all the question, the first and simplest of all ques- 
tions, is what happened to his huge preparations when 
they were first poured out upon Paris. They were, in the 
first week or two, out-generalled and defeated in the open 
by a very much smaller force ; nothing they can say or 
do can efface that fact of history. But all they have 
done since illustrates much more widely the error of 
trusting to their particular theory and method. In the 
true and creative sense they have done nothing at all 
since ; for they have only done the same thing over and 
over again. They not only tried perpetually to do things 
they did not succeed in doing, but they tried to do things 
that could not be done. Not only did they in Russia con- 
tinually capture something the Russians evacuated ; 
but they are now at Verdun trying to capture something 
the French have destroyed. 
German discipline seems to be the science of repeating 
a mistake. It would really seem as if the concentration 
of the mind on mechanical triumphs made the mind itself 
mechanical. The essence of all machinery is recurrence. 
But though the engine must repeat itself to be a success, 
if the engineer always repeats himself he will be a bore. 
The wheel is always returning and beginning again ; 
but we do not want the coach to be always going back and 
starting again. Nowadays it does not seem so much to 
be the North Germans who make a machine that repeats 
itself ; it is rather the machmc that makes them repeat 
themselves. The fanciful might think they had really 
found perpetual motion, the impossibility — which has 
passed into a proverb ; and that they had found it, like 
so many things mysteriously forbidden, a disaster for 
the sons of men. 
Those who talk as if the English tradition of liberty or 
looseness were an unmixed weakness are perpetually 
reminding us of the fiasco of Gallipoli. The English 
a,bandoned the effort against Gallipoli. The Germans 
have not abandoned the effort against Verdun. To 
them it will probably appear a paradox, but it is a very 
solid truism, that the Germans have therefore suffered a 
much more crushing defeat than the English. The 
application of the same truth in other fields would call 
for a lengthy statement, and many of its aptest illustra- 
tions will not be known in detail till after the war. But 
amateurish as I am, even for an Englishman, I will 
venture the strong suspicion that immeasurably more 
novelties and originalities have been added to the naval 
policy which we inherited than to the military policy which 
the Prussians inherited. 
A Living Thing 
But there is a much wider area in which the truth is 
supremely true and supremely important. I mean, of 
course, the English tradition of a liberal adaptibility 
in the problems of colonies and dependencies. Here 
again a mere Jingo optimism merely swamps the honest 
objectivity of the claim we can really make. England 
has done many things which I, as an Englishman, 
deplore or detest ; she has done some things which all 
Englishmen deplore or detest. But what is strictly and 
scientifically true about England is this ; that wherever 
the English influence is present, men feel that it has 
something which I can only call the flexibility of a living 
thing. The vital point is not that these things were done ; 
it is that they were done and undone ; that the men 
who made the mistake were alive enough to see the mis- 
take. The strength of the Prussian, not by our account, 
but by his own account, lies in his inflexibility ; and there 
are not wanting at this moment advocates of panic and 
persecution to urge this foreign fad upon the government 
of England. 
The truth is that amnesty and compromise have been 
for England a strength in the very strongest sense ; that 
most athletic type of strength that goes with activity. 
A wooden leg is not stronger than a living leg, because- it 
does not flinch and draw back when it steps on a thorn. 
The strength of the English influence has been that at the 
extremest limits of its sprawling limbs it has been at least 
alive ; and known the nature of what it touched. People 
complained of it, but they also cornplained to it ; for 
they knew it had strength enough to move and mend. 
But the wooden leg is planted firmly in Belgium to-day ; 
and we shall not waste our time in complaining to. a 
wooden leg. We shall do so the less because the wooden 
leg is in truth adorned and completed by a wooden head ; 
and the whole is one huge wooden idol carved like 
Hindenburg, which the limbs of living men shall lift and 
cast into the fire. 
Little has been written about the conquest of German 
South-West Africa and a volume dealing with it is therefore 
doubly welcome. In With Botha's. Army, by J. P. Kay 
Robinson (George Allen and Unvvin) 2s. 6d., we have a story 
which has little to do with fighting the Hun, but a great dea 
to say about fighting hostile forces of Nature. This cam- 
paign among the sand-dunes between the desert and the sea 
was most picturesque (and most unpleasant), and Mr. Kay 
Robinson, who was a trooper in the Imperial Light Horse, 
conveys to us the lighthearted manner in which the hardest 
day's work and the worst sandstorms were faced. ' 
Coming of a Uterary family, "the author has an exceptional 
power of expression, and his descriptions of this weird kind 
of dustbin, out of which they dig diamonds, are vivid and 
entertaining. Before he writes another book, he will we 
liope, realise how dull and wearisome is the repetition of ex- 
pletives. There's not much difterence between soap-suds 
and the froth of Niagara ; it is tlie force that generates the 
two that counts. So is [it with "language," and, as this 
fort* cannot be transferred to the printed page, oaths are 
more effective taken as read. But this is a really fine little 
book, a N'aluable addition to a War Library, 
